Hacker News Reader

Comment by adrian_b | Hacker News Reader

Palantir already offers a "turnkey AI datacenter", i.e. a rack with "NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra systems with eight NVIDIA Blackwell Ultra GPUs and NVIDIA Spectrum-X™ Ethernet networking for AI training and inference".

It is said that it comes with all hardware and software required to run inference or training with an open weights LLM.

The existence of this product, which competes with cloud-based offerings like those of OpenAI and Anthropic, is presumably the reason why the Palantir CEO criticized very harshly some time ago the business model of OpenAI/Anthropic.

While I doubt that the ethics of Palantir is any better than of OpenAI/Anthropic, in this particular case I have to agree with Alex Karp about "Sovereign AI", i.e. that only losers will make their business completely dependent on an external entity like OpenAI or Anthropic, who are certainly not trustworthy.

View on HN

I'm not sure a data center run by ... Palantir of all organizations is what people have in mind when they worry about data sovereignty.

They are selling it, not running it.

It is just a dedicated computer system, which should be managed by its owner, like any other on-prem servers.

I doubt that it has a good price/performance ratio, but it is a solution for those who feel that they do not want to search, buy, assemble, install and configure every HW/SW component.

For those that don't mind a lot of rootkit and embedded spyware you mean

I take it we saw different demos.

I'm under no NDA, if you actually want to know what's up.

I want to know, please tell us

Ohhh spooky vaguepost.

I'm assuming you're alluding to them selling a managed solution, alongside the unmanaged solution that the GP is referring to?

Fair but the idea of "running your LLM setup" at every "need" level and corresponding cost does make sense.

For a lot of people (and orgs I'd guess) who just go and buy ≈$20 per month plans (or more for teams), they might not even need a fraction of that cost or capability. A lot of them don't even need it for coding or graphics. Even the API access based pricing aren't great from these frontier US AI houses. The distribution of "LLM being" offered will also give rise to many open-router like offering but at the end point level - direct interfaces to the customers. Pick your vendor sort.

AI shouldn't become another "search means Google".

I mean you could opt for the exabox from tinygrad https://tinygrad.org/#tinybox

It comes in a full sized shipping container and costs around $10M but money has stopped being connected to reality now anyway with all the AI company valuations being floated around, so who cares about a few million here or there.

How is this different from buying a supermicro rack? Better support?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com